Month: June 2009

Have I ever told you about how much I really hate Ad Servers? Each on claiming to have the most perfect, most simple, and of course, propriety system of doing rich media banners. And each time a new one comes along, it's yet another way of uploading, approving, and setting up. And each time, it's learning new ways to code expandables, syncing videos, setting Shared Objects, and setting clickTags.

And it's always far from perfect. Either they don't support AS3, or you cannot preview locally and their upload system always crashes, or you cannot open more then one file at once (or worse, you have to open ALL files at once), or Safari doesn't show TLAs, or the they don't have their code set up in classes, or they never answer your emails when you come up with a question that they can't answer.

Do I blame Adobe for not having a system to make all this work in one way? Or do I continue to blame crappy Ad Servers for having such large egos?

My final project with Fjord has finally gone live after a 3 month development cycle.

Seemed like a simple concept at first, but ended up taking some creative code with bitmap data objects in order to get things moving at a decent speed. One bitmap, continuously re-drawn, was used for displaying all the items in the cave, and the other (kept invisible) was used for hit testing when the cave slice got to a certain scale.

Well, after a year and a half in the political mess that is full-time Agency work, I'm finally back at my roots freelance Flash development. It's exciting to be able to work whenever I want again, but I'm finding it more difficult then I remember to motivate myself. Lets hope that it's like riding a bike...